Oh, Julia!

August 15, 2012 •

Julia Child would have been 100 years old today. “Hooray!” I am delighted to join the Bread Baking Babes and Buddies in celebrating the life and accomplishment of this remarkable woman — a true Babe — with Julia’s Pain Français (French bread).

Oh, Julia, thank you, thank you, thank you for this! Thank you for your dedication and your passion, your curiosity and your ingenuity, without which you would not have brought French bread into the purview of the home baker for the first time.

Published in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Twoin 1970,Pain Français was a landmark achievement. In her engaging memoir My Life in France, Julia wrote that it was “one of the most difficult, elaborate, frustrating, and satisfying challenges I have ever undertaken.” After she and her husband Paul baked loaf upon trial loaf with less-than-successful results (“they tasted all right, but they weren’t anything like real French bread”), Julia ultimately sought the guidance of renowned French boulangerie expert, Professor Raymond Calvel. He taught her about proper dough consistency (“soft and sticky”), about giving it a long cool fermentation to allow complex flavors to develop, and about good shaping and slashing technique. “By the end of the day, our loaves were turning out just right, and I was feeling euphoric. It was as though the sun in all his glory had suddenly broken through the shades of gloom!”

Professor Calvel also showed Julia how professional baking ovens use a hot stone surface and a burst of steam to achieve a wonderfully crisp crust. Back home in Massachusetts, it was up to Julia and Paul to devise a way of replicating these in a home oven. They arrived at asbestos cement tiles as a baking surface, and a hot brick dropped into a pan of water in the oven as a “steam contraption.” (The asbestos tiles were eliminated in favor of quarry tiles in the book’s second printing, after the carcinogenicity of asbestos was discovered.) Never before had these techniques been implemented. Oh, Julia, you were an innovator in so many ways!

I have summarized the recipe for Pain Français below, but you really owe it to yourself to read the original. In her inimitable straightforward but meticulous style, and with copious illustrations, Julia takes 20 pages in Mastering … Volume Two to detail every technique, from mixing (kneading) to fermenting to shaping to baking. She tells us things like why we cannot speed up the process, but how we can slow it down if we need to, and how to tell when the dough has risen sufficiently, and how to transfer the bread to the baking stone, and where we might improve if we didn’t get the results we wanted. She tells us everything. Oh, Julia!

I really don’t know how to properly thank either Julia Child or you, Susan, for having us make this bread. When we smelled it baking, cut it open and ate it, savouring every crumb, like Julia, we were euphoric.

Well, yours are perfect! Julia would be proud! Now do I have the patience and courage? Your directions are so straightforward and simple to follow you may have just given me the courage! And if I could bake bread anything like yours…

Thank you Susan for bringing me back to this one. Everytime I’ve baked this my husband says it’s like being transported back to Paris. Julia has inspired so many and seems like she will continue doing so for a long time to come. A joy to just discovering her but I’m so happy to be knowing her so much better with each of her recipes and all the stories from others.
Love how you did the paper on the loaves with the string. I’ve been handed loaves like that in France 😉

Julia would have been thrilled to know you made pain français on her birthday! Coming from a baker it is indeed the best possible tribute. Thank you for sharing her enthusiasm, her dedication and… her recipe!

I am so sad I could not join this party… just so that you know, I now realize what the problem was. I placed the dough in the wine cooler overnight to continue on the following day. My bread was flat and hard as a hockey puck. Only three days later Phil and I realized the unit had a problem and the half where I left the dough was not working, so my dough stayed for 16 hours in too warm an environment. The yeast was exhausted by the time I continued.

oh, well….

thanks for the heads up on this, though, I really wish I had been able to join the party

Susan, you and Julia are two of my idols: Julia, of course, for what she has done for the home cook and for affecting a whole new respect for cooking. And, you for providing a web mecca for us home bakers to visit every Friday. I’ve been following you since your picture perfect Panetone I found searching the web for the holidays several years ago.
I thank you and Julia for my finally being able to make a great baguette because it was a combination of both of your wise advice and recipes that I was able to achieve the proper, crumb, crust, appearance and flavor (I’m sure Julia would not have missed that tidbit you’ve added about using diastatic malt when she wrote her recipe had that magical ingredient been available to the general public:)) Thank you for your inspiration.

Thanks so much for for the recipe. I made three loaves yesterday. Very tasty, but the crust was not as crusty as it should be. Could I have sprayed too much water? I may have undercooked its as they were not very dark in color either. Any other ideas, Thanks.

I am making this right this second. I love Julia Child but have never attempted her own recipe well for fear I would end up screwing it up 100%. However this seems like one I can handle! Thank you for posting. I will keep you updated on my success….even if its not at a 100% 😉

Made this bread yesterday. So good! Quite a project, but well worth it. You have inspired me to dig much more deeply into this bread thing. Been baking for twenty-odd years, time for some serious study!

Thanks, Julia for sharing the lovely recipe with us. It seems to be very delicious and yummy!!. My daughters love french bread in the school tiffin box. I have made it sometimes but I could not make it tasty. I definitely try your recipe.

Thank you for your beautiful post on Julia Child’s French Bread Recipe.

Could you please help me out with the following: is this an 84% Hydration rate formula? If so, does it actually work with All-Purpose Flour in the US?

I live in Brazil and usuall bake with French T-65 and T-80, using natural levain as the rising agent but have not dared go beyond a 78% hydration rate.
These 2 flours have a gluten content in the neighbourhood of 12%.

Thank you for the cliff’s notes- I do this with most of Julia’s recipes myself, shorten into efficient notes I’ll understand, and so I know it does take some effort- thank you! Mine are usually chicken-scratched in the margins or some random piece of note paper in such a way that I can’t really read them later though, so this is quite nice and much appreciated.